Amazon's First Trans-Atlantic Cable: USA/Ireland

Amazon Ireland has applied for a maritime usage license to land a planned cable connecting Ireland to the United States. It is considering landing near Castlefreke on Ireland's South Coast in County Cork along a stretch of beach called the Strand. Amazon has made no public announcement so far. Here is the filed application: https://lnkd.in/dUF__j8V. I discovered this when I came across a local Irish newspaper that mentioned that Amazon was looking at a nearby beach for a cable landing. I then did a Google search and found the filing. All these filings are posted online and they are 'leading indicators' as economists would say of what is going to happen. 

No subsea cables currently land on Ireland's South Coast other than EXA's Express and that is part of the reason that Amazon finds it so appealing. Such a cable would be physically diverse at least on the terrestrial side to the Irish Sea and older Atlantic cables like Hibernia North and South and AC1. I can never emphasize enough how much money Amazon loses if it cannot serve its customers for even just a few seconds. Uptime and low latency are key criteria for Amazon's network people. Another advantage is that the presence of Express suggests there is fibre available in the region for back haul. 

Amazon has many Cloud data centres in Ireland plus it uses Ireland to serve Europe for its retail e-commerce business. It is difficult to track them all, but there are probably at least 18 Amazon facilities with more than million square feet of space. Amazon has 7 data centres in operation or planning at Cruiserath Road, Dublin. But it has also 5 in Clonshaugh Business Park where EXA has its CLS. There are also 3 in Blanchardstown Business Park and more elsewhere. 

If I had to guess, I think Amazon will go for a 12 fibre pair spatial division multiplexing cable. A relatively modest number of fibre pairs in an era where up to 24 is doable for a project spanning the Atlantic. Amazon has a frugal streak which has been key to its success in the low margin retail business. I believe it explains why Amazon has moved much slowly into subsea cable ownership than Google. Furthermore Amazon's net cash flows are much smaller than Google. Consequently, it does not have Google's Everest size mountain of cash. But clearly just as important is that its traffic flows are probably smaller than Google's due to its large Cloud business. The Cloud is a computation centre, not a traffic distribution point. In fact, the egress charges guarantee that ISPs and other high traffic entities will not domicile there. Finally, I suspect Google's search engine traffic is much more latency sensitive than Amazon's cloud traffic. Uploading data to the public cloud is not an ultra-latency sensitive undertaking. Hence Google has greater need for Layer 1 transport and given the traffic volumes, ownership is the best solution. 

If you look at the subsea cable map at the bottom, EXA Express lands to the South of Castlefreke and Amazon's new Beaufort cable lands to the North of the Strand beach that Amazon is considering landing. So this is ideal as it allows Amazon to split traffic from the US into two streams, one going to Dublin and the other to London via Beaufort which lands in Cornwall. 

Picture of Strand Beach Near Castlefreke, Cork County, Ireland


Map of Ireland's Southern Coast


Map of Ireland's Subsea Cables

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